So, with the boys at least temporarily in the custody of their mother, Viktor arranged to keep it that way by getting out of sight. After a little thought he headed for the most remote habitable part of the ship, the freezatorium.
"Habitable" was almost too strong a word. The narrow aisles between the frost-clouded crystal coffins were freezing cold. The crystal was a good thermal insulator, but the liquid-gas cold inside each casket had had a hundred years to chill through it. Each casket was rimed with hoarfrost. The air was deliberately kept dryer than comfort would suggest in that section of the ship—Viktor could feel his throat getting raw as he breathed it—but even those faint residual traces of water vapor had condensed out on the crystal.
Although Viktor had had the forethought to borrow a long-sleeved sweater of his mother's, it wasn't enough. He had no clothes warm enough for that place. As he tiptoed along the corridors he was shivering violently.
He rubbed some of the frost off one of the caskets with the sleeve of the sweater. Inside was a woman alone, dark-skinned, her eyes closed but her mouth open, looking as though she were trying to scream. The card in the holder at the corner of the casket said Accardo, Elisavetta (Agronomist—plant breeder), but Viktor had never seen that woman before, or heard that name. Likely enough she was one of the ones already in the freezer by the time his parents joined the ship.
And he wasn't much interested in thinking about her, either. The cold was getting serious. It would be better even to face the Stockbridge boys again than to stay here, he thought.
As he turned to hurry back through the double thermal doors, he heard his name called. "Viktor! What are you doing here, dressed like that? Are you crazy?"
It was Wanda Mei, furred and gauntleted, her old eyes peering out at him over a thick scarf that wound over her head and across the lower part of her face. Viktor greeted her uneasily. He didn't particularly want to see Wanda Mei; he had been making a point of avoiding her, because it gave him an uneasy feeling in his stomach to know that this decrepit human wreck had once been his bouncy playmate. "Well," she said, "as long as you're here you can give me a hand. We'll have to put some more clothes on you, though." And she tugged him down to a bend in the corridor where it widened out to a little workshop. From a locker she pulled out a furred jacket like her own and furred overshoes and a soft, warmly lined helmet that came down over his ears, and then she set him to work.
Her job had been tugging some of the huge crystal caskets out of their wall racks, setting them in place at the workshop. Empty, they weren't heavy, but Viktor's help was welcome. "Why are we doing this?" he asked.
"For the people that are going into the freezer again, of course," she said crossly. "What, are you too weak to help me? I was doing it myself until you came along, an old woman like me." And indeed the work was mostly just awkward. "That one," she said, pointing to one already stacked, "that one was yours, Viktor. For you and your family. How did you like it, all those years you slept there?"
He swallowed, looking at it without joy. "Are we going to be frozen again?"
"Not right away, no, not you; that's why yours is on the bottom. But before long, I think. This one here, this is for the Stockbridges; they go back in about three days, I think."
"In three days?"
She sighed. "It is my hearing that should be weakening, not yours. Can't you understand me? The emergency is over, they say, so the extra people can be corpsicles again." She looked at him, then softened. "Ah, are you worrying?"
"You told me to worry!"
She smiled, then apologized. "If I am frightened, that is my business. I didn't mean to scare you. You've already been frozen once, and survived. Was it so bad?"
"I don't remember," Viktor said truthfully. All he remembered was being given a tiny shot that caused him to fall asleep, with the freezer technicians hovering reassuringly around him; and then waking up again. Whatever had happened in between had happened without his consciousness present to observe.
He worked silently with ancient Wanda Mei for a while, doing as he was told but thinking about Marie-Claude going back into the freezer. A thought had occurred to him. He would, he calculated, be sure to gain at least a few days on her by staying unfrozen longer than she. If only there were some way of prolonging that time— If he could stay thawed and living on the ship until it landed— Why, then he would be almost her own age, even old enough to be taken seriously by her!
That thought, however, still left the problem of her husband unsolved. "Hell," he said, softly but aloud, and Wanda looked at him.
"You're tired," she said, which wasn't true, "and you're cold—" which certainly was. "Well, we've done enough; thank you for your help, Viktor." And then, back in the warm part of the ship, she thought for a moment and then said: "Do you like books, Viktor? I have some in my room."
"There are plenty of books in the library," he pointed out.
"These are my books. Kid's books," she amplified. "From when I was your age. I've just kept them. You can borrow them if you want."
"Maybe some time," Viktor said vaguely.
She looked cross. "Why not this time? Come on, you haven't seen my room."
Indeed he hadn't. Actually, he didn't much want to now. There wasn't any real reason for that, only the kind of queasy, uneasy feeling that Wanda gave him. It wasn't just that she was old. He'd seen plenty of old people—well, not usually as old as Wanda, of course; but for a twelve-year-old anyone past thirty is pretty much in the same general age cohort anyway. Wanda was different. She was both old and his own age, and seeing her reminded Viktor, in terms he could not ignore, that one day he, too, would have wrinkles and age spots on the backs of his hands and graying hair. She was his future displayed for him, and unwelcome. It shattered his child's confidence that he would remain a child.
He entered Wanda's room diffidently. It smelled terrible. He saw that it wasn't in any way like the one Viktor shared with his parents. It had started out identical, of course—every room on the ship was basically the same standard cubicle, since each one would become a separate landing pod when the colonists arrived at their destination—but over a hundred years she had decorated it and painted it and added bits of furnishings and knickknacks that were her own … and it had one bit of furnishing that Viktor had not at all expected and saw with astonished delight.
Wanda Mei had a cat!
The cat's name was Robert, a whole tom who was, Wanda said, nearly twenty years old. "He won't last any longer than I will," she said, sighing as she sat down. The cat stalked toward her, then soared into her lap, but she gave him a quick stroke and handed him generously to Viktor. "You hold him while I find the books," she ordered. Viktor was glad to oblige. The old cat turned around twice in his lap and then allowed his back to be stroked, nuzzling his whiskery cheek contentedly into Viktor's belly.
Viktor was almost sorry when Wanda produced the books. But they were grand. She had Tom Sawyer and Two Little Savages and Mistress Masham's Repose and a dozen others—worn, dog-eared, the bindings sometimes cracked, but still entirely readable.
Only the catbox smell of the room began to get to him. He stood.
"I have to go now," he announced. She looked surprised but didn't object. "Thank you for the books," he remembered to say, politely. She nodded.
And then, as he reached the door, he asked the question that had been on his mind all along. "Wanda? Why did you do it?"
"Why did I do what?" she demanded crossly.
"Why did you let yourself get old?"